Your Landscape 101: Growing Success in Utah's Soil

James Batton is teaching Landscape 101 at the Red Butte Garden Classroom on Wednesday, November 4, from 6:30 to 8:30 PM. It's a practical introduction to gardening and landscaping built specifically for Utah conditions, which is a good place to start if you've ever bought a plant that looked great at the nursery only to watch it struggle once it hit your own dirt.

That's the whole point of the class: the Wasatch Front has a few particular challenges that can trip up even a well-meaning gardener. There's the dense alkaline clay soil, the intense high-elevation sun, the dry air, those unpredictable spring frosts, and the water limitations we all deal with. When you combine them, it's easy to see why things don't always take. Batton spends the session showing how soil, water, sun exposure, and plant selection all fit together in this region, with a focus on how to handle clay soils, how to water efficiently in a dry climate, how to spot microclimates in your own yard, and how to avoid the common planting mistakes that set you back.

Batton is a consulting horticulturist and arborist with decades of hands-on experience working with Utah's soils and climate, so he's coming at this from the ground up rather than from a textbook. The class is designed to be a practical guide you can actually use in your own garden.

Registration stays open online until the class begins, though in-person and phone sign-ups close at 5:00 PM on the day of. It's $30.40 for Garden Members and $38.00 for the general public.